Entropy-based visual servoing

In this work we propose a new way to achieve visual servoing using directly the information (as defined by Shannon) of the image. A metric derived from information theory, mutual information, is considered. Mutual information is widely used in multi-modal image registration (medical applications) since it is insensitive to changes in the lighting condition and to a wide class of non-linear image transformation. In this paper mutual-information is used as a new visual feature for visual servoing and allows us to build a new control law to control the 6 dof of the robot. Among various advantages, this approach does not require any matching nor tracking step, is robust to large illumination variation and allows to consider, within the same task, different image modalities. Experiments that demonstrate these advantages conclude the paper.